This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) allow a large number (e.g., tens of thousands) of resource-constrained devices to be interconnected to form a wireless mesh network. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed a routing protocol (“6TiSCH”) that provides IPv6 routing using time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) based on IEEE 802.15.4e. Although a centralized entity such as a Path Computation Entity (PCE) can be used for route calculation between a small number of different network devices, the complexity in calculating a TSCH schedule by the PCE limits the number of network devices to less than one hundred (100) within the network, or more typically no more than about thirty (30) network devices, as the PCE is incapable of maintaining the peerings between a larger number of network devices. Hence, a PCE is incapable of calculating 6TiSCH routes between network devices in a data network containing a larger number of network devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,344,256 to Cisco Technology, Inc., describes a path computation element (PCE) device that can classify each member network device that belongs to a directed acyclic graph for a destination as a member of a dominating set, such that any network device in the network either is a member of the dominating set, or a “leaf network device” that is one and only one hop away from a member of the dominating set.